Stephanie Shirley, a British tech pioneer who cleverly used the name Steve to gain a foothold in the male-dominated world of computing and get her software company off the ground in the early 1960s, hiring almost exclusively women as an early promoter of remote work, died on Aug. 9 in Reading, England. She was 91.
Her death, in a nursing home, was confirmed by Lynn Hart, her spokeswoman, who said that Ms. Shirley had experienced a brief illness.
A refugee at age 5 from Nazi-occupied Austria just before World War II, she lived with a foster family in the West Midlands of England, near the Wales border. She often expressed appreciation for her adopted country, which gave her a “life worth saving,” she said, but she found career opportunities there for girls and women in the 1950s and early ’60s to be limited and stultifying.
When she started her software business, Freelance Programmers, in 1962, British women could not work on the stock exchange floor or even drive a bus. Her initial financing was six pounds (roughly $16.85 then and about $220 today), but she needed her husband’s signature to open the company’s bank account and deposit her own money.
In a 2015 TED Talk, Ms. Shirley said, “You can always tell ambitious women by the shape of our heads — they’re flat on top from being patted patronizingly.”
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The post Stephanie Shirley, Who Created a Tech World for Women, Dies at 91 appeared first on New York Times.
